SEO Statistics for 2026: Search Share, Click Rates, AI Overviews and What SEO Costs

Twelve SEO figures, each with a name and a date attached

Every figure below was opened on the publisher's own page in October 2026. Where a newer edition existed, we used it. Where the best study is older than 2024, the table says so, because a click curve measured before AI Overviews describes a different results page. This page is part of our marketing statistics library; the Google search statistics page goes deeper on query volume and devices.

Google still owns the search box, and chatbots have found the side door

StatCounter puts Google at 85.19% of US search engine referrals in September 2026, with Bing at 9.89%, Yahoo at 2.64% and DuckDuckGo at 1.75%. On US mobile alone, Google's share was 94.13%. Worldwide it was 89.94%. One detail changes how to quote these: StatCounter's FAQ says its figures count search engine referrals, meaning visits that arrive at websites from a search engine, not searches performed. Market share of clicks out is not market share of questions asked.

Bing's 9.89% matters more than it looks. Microsoft says experiences like Copilot are powered by Bing's search index, so a business invisible in Bing is invisible in a second assistant too. Our page on GEO versus SEO explains where the two jobs overlap.

The questions themselves are leaking elsewhere. Pew Research Center's 2026 survey of 5,119 US adults found 49% use AI chatbots, 44% use ChatGPT, and 42% use chatbots to search for information. Pew notes its question wording changed in 2026, so the jump from 34% ChatGPT use in 2025 is not a perfectly clean comparison. Inside Google, the new AI Mode is still small in clickstream terms: SparkToro counted 0.34% of searches reaching it from January to April 2026, even as Google reported more than 1 billion monthly AI Mode users in July 2026.

Click-through rate by position: the curves carry a date stamp

The two largest public click curves predate AI Overviews, and they agree with each other. Sistrix analyzed over 80 million keywords and published in 2020: position 1 averaged 28.5%, position 2 15.7%, position 3 11% and position 10 2.5%. On results with sitelinks, Sistrix measured 46.9% for position 1, a special case worth keeping out of any comparison with your own pages.

Backlinko's 2019 study took Search Console data covering 1,312,881 pages and 12,166,560 queries and put the first result at 27.6%, about ten times the click rate of position 10. Two separate datasets, a year apart, both near 28%: that is as close to a law as SEO gets. It is also a law written for a results page that no longer exists on many informational searches.

• Use the old curves for navigational and local searches, where AI summaries appear less often, and treat them as a ceiling elsewhere.
• Expect your own position 1 CTR to fall below 28% on questions Google can answer on the page.
• Branded searches inflate any average, so separate them before comparing your numbers to a study.
• Read your real curve in Search Console's Performance report, filtered to one page at a time.

Our guide to click-through rate shows where to find the number in Search Console and how to raise it honestly.

Zero-click searches and AI Overviews, study by study

SparkToro found 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click from January to April 2026, using Similarweb's panel. SparkToro itself warns the comparison with its 2024 study mixes panels, since 2024's data came from Datos, so read the trend as direction rather than a precise slope. Zero-click includes searchers who got their answer, gave up or simply searched again.

Pew's study is the cleanest look at real people. It tracked the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025: 18% of their Google searches produced an AI summary, and on those pages users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% on pages without one. They clicked a link inside the summary on 1% of visits, and ended the browsing session on 26% of summary pages compared with 16% elsewhere.

Ahrefs measured the top-ranking page across 300,000 keywords and found an AI Overview associated with a 58% lower click-through rate on December 2025 data, up from 34.5% in its April 2025 study. Seer Interactive tracked 3,119 informational queries for 42 clients from June 2024 to September 2025: organic CTR on queries with an AI Overview fell 61%, from 1.76% to 0.61%. Queries without one fell 41% too.

Google's side of the ledger: AI Overviews has more than 2.5 billion monthly users, per Google in May 2026, and Google says AI features send billions of clicks a week and that clicks from these pages are higher quality. If your own clicks fell while rankings held, the guide to AI Overviews taking your clicks shows how to confirm it.

How hard ranking is: page age and the 96% that get nothing

Ahrefs' 2023 traffic study looked at about 14 billion pages in its index: 96.55% got zero traffic from Google, and another 1.94% got between one and ten visits a month. The figure is older than we would like, but no one else publishes a sample anywhere near that size, so it remains the best answer to how much of the web Google ignores.

The 2025 follow-up on ranking speed is starker. Ahrefs took 1 million random URLs first seen in September 2023 and checked whether any reached Google's top 10 within a year. Only 1.74% did, down from 5.7% in its 2017 version. Among top-10 results for 1.3 million US keywords, 72.9% of pages were more than three years old, and the average number one page was five years old.

The average page ranking first in Google is older than most marketing plans.

The practical reading: SEO pays slowly, and old pages that get maintained beat new pages that get abandoned. That is why we send people to how long SEO takes before they sign anything, and why evergreen content and content relaunches usually earn more than a fresh post every Tuesday. Ahrefs adds the caveat its own data deserves: some of the shift may come from sampling differences between the two studies.

What businesses pay for SEO, according to the people who sell it

The most cited SEO pricing survey is Ahrefs' poll of 439 SEO providers, published in December 2023. Its averages: $2,917 a month overall, $3,209 for agencies, $3,250 for consultants, $1,348 for freelancers, and $1,557 a month for local SEO. 78.2% of providers charge a monthly retainer, and 23% charge between $500 and $1,000 a month.

Read the method before quoting the averages. Ahrefs asked for price bands, then assumed every respondent charged the top of their band, so a provider in the $1,001 to $1,500 tier counts as $1,500. That pushes every average up. It is also a survey of sellers describing their prices, not buyers describing their invoices.

For contrast, LocaliQ's 2026 benchmarks from its clients' Google and Microsoft Ads campaigns put the average search ad click at $5.42 and the average cost per lead at $66.69. Paid clicks stop when the budget does; ranked pages keep working while they hold. The two are complements, as our page on SEO and PPC together argues, and the PPC statistics page has the ad numbers in full.

DataCram's own SEO programs start at $625 a month, and most local businesses land between $625 and $2,250, with no long contract.

B2B SEO statistics: why the shelf looks thin

Search for B2B SEO statistics and you will find the same dozen percentages in forty roundups, many pointing back to analyst reports behind a paywall. Some of the most quoted analyst and government publishers also refused our automated fetch while we wrote this, so we could not check their figures at the source and left them out. That is the rule here, not an apology.

One B2B finding we could open: the Content Marketing Institute's 2026 research, its 16th annual survey with MarketingProfs, released October 2025. Nine in 10 B2B marketers use AI to produce content, fewer than 4 in 10 say it has improved performance, and 45% expect to increase investment in AI tools in 2026. The B2B marketing statistics page collects buyer research as we verify it, and SEO for B2B companies covers what to do with it.

How to read these numbers before one lands in a slide

1. 1

   Check what was counted

   StatCounter counts referrals, not searches. Pew counts visits by 900 people. Ahrefs counts pages in its own crawl. Three different things, all called search.

2. 2

   Check whose data it is

   Seer's figures come from 42 client organizations and informational queries only. That is a real sample, and it is not your plumbing company's search mix.

3. 3

   Check the date against the results page

   Any click curve from before May 2024, when AI Overviews began rolling out to everyone in the US, measures a page with no AI summary on it.

4. 4

   Check who is selling what

   Ahrefs sells SEO software, SparkToro sells audience research, LocaliQ sells ad management, and an AI visibility vendor will find AI visibility urgent. Vendor studies can be excellent. They are rarely gloomy about the vendor's product.

5. 5

   Check the math

   Top-of-band pricing, correlation offered as cause, and percentages of percentages all inflate a headline without a single false sentence.

If a statistic survives all five, quote it with the organization and the year. If it does not, quote your own Search Console data instead, which is the one study guaranteed to match your business.

Turning industry averages into your own baseline

Every number above is an average of other people's websites. The useful version is yours: clicks, impressions and position for your service pages in Google Search Console, leads tied to organic visits in GA4, and a monthly report built on the handful of SEO KPIs that connect to revenue. Since August 31, 2026, Search Console also reports how often your links appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode.

For a fast outside read, the free website audit checks speed, SEO, mobile and content and emails a report, and the local visibility check shows where you appear in Google search and maps for your customers' terms. When the numbers say the work is bigger than an afternoon, DataCram's SEO services start with that audit and report the leads, not just the rankings. The SEO guide covers the rest for anyone doing it alone.